I think evil Big Ag company Monsanto, with its currently foundering stock price, actually wants to be bought by Big Pharma company Bayer.

What entity currently associated mostly with the Earth-poisoning herbicide Roundup wouldn’t rather be associated with the inventors of aspirin, the wonder drug that beats back headaches while helping prevent heart attacks and strokes?

Of course this is mere conjecture on my part, and of course I am just trying to get a rise out of you, and the PR flacks at Monsanto HQ near St. Louis, by calling the company evil.

But it is evil, and has been for a century. These are the folks who formerly brought you DDT, PCBs and Agent Orange. It’s also as slippery as a catfish, one whose electric antennae will shock you silly. It’s as good at shucking off the controversial parts of its business and pivoting in a different direction as it is in firing off letters to the editor when a columnist calls it evil.

But it also realizes it’s in a lousy position now, and lousy is not good for the market capitalization. What other mega-corporation these indifferent days still makes Americans so mad they sport bumper stickers laying into it? While Bob Dylan may be strumming through his mid-70s by releasing new versions of Frank Sinatra favorites, his fellow Oldchella performer Neil Young last year penned an entire album called “The Monsanto Years.” Sings ol’ Neil: “Give us this day our daily bread and let us not go with Monsanto / The seeds of life are not what they once were / Mother Nature and God don’t own them anymore.”

The last bit is a reference to one of the most brilliant evil-genius schemes of Monsanto. Farmers have been fighting weeds since agriculture began, and Roundup is really, really good at killing plants, including weeds, working from the inside out. Problem is, it would then also kill your crop. Except, of course, unless you buy your seeds from Monsanto, which has developed Roundup-resistant soybeans and whatnot through genetic modification.

So they get you coming and going, which is good business. The trifecta here is that Monsanto patents those seeds. When you grow your crop successfully, you can’t use its seeds to plant next year. You don’t own them. You have to buy new ones from Monsanto.

The company is so not dumb. Go to its website and the first words you see are “sustainable agriculture” and “tackling climate change.” This is brilliant Newspeak, because what sustainable agriculture means to most of us is growing stuff without pesticides and herbicides, which is precisely what Monsanto makes out like a bandit peddling.

Several years ago our editorial board declined to support the initiative that would have labeled genetically modified foods for what they are. I was a dissenter, but I do agree that labeling implies there’s a problem, and people who know more chemistry than I do say that’s a scientifically misleading assertion.

California voters agreed. But Vermont voters did pass such a labeling law, which went into effect Friday, and so when Congress returns after the July 4 recess, Monsanto lobbyists will kick the rear ends of the senators they give millions to until they pass a federal law forbidding states from having their own labeling laws. Whatever happened to most of these politicians’ nominal support for states’ rights?

Evil devils are just so smart. When Monsanto drops me a note Tuesday morning, I’ll take it up on its claim to be “sustainable,” and find out when it will stop making Roundup, which not only kills weeds, but which the World Health Organization says is “probably carcinogenic” — cancer-causing — “in humans.”

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.

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